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Within the last week, one of the largest music download websites was shutdown by British and Dutch police. Houses were raided, computers confiscated as evidence and people arrested in both Britain and Holland. According to the BBC the whole investigation took two years by the IFPI and BPI. Well, they can’t be happy bunnies when within one week there are plans afoot by The Pirate Bay to build OiNK v2 in the form of BOiNK.CD. Word of this rebirth is already widely available on the Internet e.g. HERE.

Two years to take down, one week to re-launch. Who looks like winning this war?

Once again the movie and music industry needs to look again at their business model and make the purchase of content from legal sources a compelling purchase. DRM restricted content makes pirate materials a more compelling source so that isn’t the right solution. Also,  consumers feel they are being ripped off for legitimate content therefore looking at costs and prices might be heading in the right direction. Some bands are now looking to circumvent the music industry completely and allow their content to be downloaded for free. They will accept donations from fans for whatever the fans believe the music is worth - now that is inspiration and deserves to succeed.

What do you think? Has the day of the public buying CDs now gone? Are we now in the day of donation-based music with fans buying special edition merchandise at band’s gigs and from their websites?

Technorati Tags: BOiNK, BPI, donation, DRM, IFPI, OiNK, The Pirate Bay

Disclaimer: Some of the information contained within this blog post is technically advanced and may cause unrecoverable changes to your system. Ensure you have a backup of your system, including disk images and any data you cannot live without! Any damage or changes you make to your system is your own responsibility.

The procedure listed here was performed on an Acer Aspire 5630 laptop running Windows XP 2005 MCE. There is no guarantee that other Acer model will work the same way so take care and work things out for yourself using this information as guidance only!

Many Acer systems come with the ability to press ALT+F10 to kick off the Acer Recovery applications from a special hidden recovery partition. Sometimes this won’t work and there can be a number of reasons.

1. D2D Recovery is “Disabled” in the BIOS (Main menu).
FIX: Enabled it and try pressing ALT+F10 again as the computer boots.

2. The Acer hidden recovery partition (PQSERVICE) has been removed or damaged. If the disk drive is a replacement drive then you won’t have this partition.
FIX: Unless you have previously imaged the PQSERVICE partition it will not be possible to use D2D recovery. You will need to restore from the Acer Recovery CD/DVD.

3. You have converted the FAT32 partition on the hard drives into NTFS. Acer D2D recovery won’t be available if you perform this conversion. Ironic that NTFS is a more desirable disk format to use but Acer won’t support this in their systems!
FIX: Restore your system from the recovery CD/DVD media.

4. The special Acer Master Boot Record (MBR)  has become corrupt or has been overwritten with an non Acer MBR. As long as the PQSERVICE partition is there or you can get your hands on a couple of Acer service files for your model, then you can remake the special Acer MBR. Let’s cover how this is done.

1. Disable D2D recovery in the BIOS. Can be found in the “Main” menu section. Save the BIOS settings and exit.
2. Log into Windows with an “administrator” level account.
3. Download ParTEDIT32.ZIP (registration required for download).
4. Extract PTEDIT32.EXE from the zip archive and run it.
5. Identify the PQSERVICE partition by its type or size.  It is likely to be 12 or another custom value and is likely to be reasonably small in comparison to the other normal partitions - see the example below from a working factory default Acer. Click to see the image full size.  
   Change the type to “07″ (Installable File System NTFS, HPFS) and “Save Changes”.
6. Reboot the computer and login with an “administrator” level account.
7. You should then be able to open up a command prompt and navigate to the PQSERVICE drive.
8. Enter the following command at the command prompt:
   mbrwrdos.exe install rtmbr.bin
   - You may have to search for these files and change into the relevant directory.
   Note: This step writes the Acer MBR, with mbrwrdos.exe and rtmbr.bin being the special service files.
9. Close the command prompt window and reboot.
10. Go into the BIOS again and enable D2D Recovery. Save the BIOS settings and exit.
11. ALT+F10 should now start Acer Recovery as the computer starts.
12. The Acer MBR ensures the PQSERVICE partition is hidden therefore there is no need to reset the partition type back to 07 - well there shouldn’t be if all has gone well. If you need to manually reset it then run PTEDIT32.EXE again, set the partition to 12, or whatever the original value was, and save the changes to complete the process. Reboot and it should now be hidden.

If Windows is unbootable, due to whatever issue, you can always use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win) along with a copy of PTEDIT32.EXE to achieve the same results. Likewise, use UBCD4Win along with PTEDIT32.EXE if the PQSERVICE partition is being changed back to a hidden one by the existing MBR. We’ll leave that as an exercise for those who need to do it! It has been pointed out in the comments that UBCD4Win already has an application that will do partition maintenance, so checkout TestDisc if you go down that road.

If this is a new drive or someone has completely wiped the drive, including the hidden partitions, it may be necessary to use partitioning software to recreate the partitions that the Acer Recovery system is expecting! You’ll also need to restore an image of the recovery partition from a previously made backup, so it is worth making that backup image straight away while the laptop is still new and shiny, and certainly well in advance of any problem.

A final word or two of caution: take great caution when playing around with partitions on an Acer system… you have been warned… and remember to make the backup media disks as soon as you fire the computer up for the first time!

Technorati Tags: Acer, D2D recovery,   master boot record, MBR, mbrwsdos.exe, ParTEDIT32, ParTEDIT32.ZIP, PQSERVICE, PTEDIT32.EXE, Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, UBCD4Win

Continuing on with our “Geek Sayings” series:

“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” - Unknown

Technorati Tags: funny, geek sayings, humor, humour

BT Homehub users should take great care as a new vulnerability allows hackers to “own” their router without knowing the administrator password. More worrying is the bad guys can then own you by customising the router configuration to allow the theft of credentials, data, services supported by the router and  eavesdropping of VOIP calls.

A demo of this in action has also been provided:

There is no reported fix from BT yet. The workaround is to avoid visiting malicious websites that take advantage of the vulnerability!

Technorati Tags: BT, BT Home Hub, hacking, vulnerability

David Berlind of ZDNet explains DRM in layman’s terms. At last someone exposes the iPod, and others of the same ilk, for the “DRM” they are and the rest!

Never purchase a multimedia device that will hobble you with DRM restrictions and lock you into a particular manufacturer’s products forever more, well not unless you wish to pay for all your multimedia content again and again and again!

You should be able to choose what device your multimedia content plays on, not some obtrusive technology forcing the decision upon you. Always choose devices and technologies that are DRM free and pay the extra for content devoid of this restrictive CRAP.

Lastly, before anyone comments, the video and audio are out of sync - just try to ignore it!

Technorati Tags: digital rights management, CRAP, DRM, iPod, multimedia, ZDNet

Milan Negovan, a Microsoft MVP, has posted a couple of articles here and here on his experience of Windows Vista. Both make for unhappy reading and things only get worse when the comments started to flood in. He found it necessary to close off the comment function on each article due to the sheer volume of mainly negative comments flooding in!

Our experience of Windows Vista has been less than good so far. We’ve found issues around drivers and hardware, there is the fundamentally flawed Windows Mail and not to forget all those legacy application and older hardware that simply doesn’t  work with Microsoft’s new baby.

We shouldn’t forget all the other issues that are being reported on other blogs and websites that makes for very bad press surround Windows Vista. Even the poor Microsoft folk are struggling with it…

Hopefully, many of these issues will be addressed by Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and improved drivers and software from vendors. Fingers crossed the updates over the coming year fulfil its potential as a killer operating system, especially in light of the “Windows ME 2.0″ tag being cited against it!

What are other people’s experiences and views of Windows Vista? Please be objective and try to keep it nice while being informative ;-).

Technorati Tags: ASPNetResources.com, Milan Negovan, Vista Service Pack 1, Vista SP1, Vista Sucks, Windows ME, Windows Vista

Reading this class action complaint some may think that Apple have a massive marketing nightmare in the pipeline regarding its policy of issuing an update that turns unlocked iPhones into useless bricks! 

The iPhone is far from being a bleeding edge phone if you look at the specification, hence we don’t really feel much sorrow for those who were gullible enough to buy into the Apple marketing message. Much better for people to get a real phone from a top class provider like Ericsson or Nokia.

Technorati Tags: Apple, class action suit, Ericsson, iPhone, Nokia

Wordpress 2.3 has been released with a new tagging system, but the latest version of Windows Live Writer was released before this new feature became public with the result that the feature is not supported by default. Luckily, Adam Vero has blogged about a workaround to make WLW support this new feature. He also goes into various issues with the new tags support and WLW, so read the article in its entirety and heed the warnings!

However, it should be noted that tags is a new supported feature and in our opinion aren’t quite ready for prime time just yet. It is still necessary to use a tagging plugin to get the level of functionality that users wish of a tagging system. This blog currently uses SimpleTags that is incredibly simple to install and just as easy to use.

Technorati Tags: Adam Vero, SimpleTags, tags, Windows Live Writer, Wordpress